


1- acceptance

by rixhawthorn



Series: inukag week 2020 [1]
Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Inukag Week 2020, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:09:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24414901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rixhawthorn/pseuds/rixhawthorn
Summary: Wanting to be seen and fearing to be seen and finally being seen, wholly for who and what he is, and being told that it's going to be okay
Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha
Series: inukag week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763131
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	1- acceptance

**Author's Note:**

> for inukag week 2020, i didn't really edit this so apologies for that :/

When he was seven years old, he’d taken cooked rice from the pot of a dying woman. She’d been old and widowed, children killed by sickness, spouse by age. The nearby village had sent out a girl every few days to check on her and bring fresh vegetables, but other than that the lady had lived wholly isolated. She’d been completely blind. 

He wonders how long she let him get away with thinking his theft was going unnoticed. He’d certainly thought himself clever at the time - what was she going to do, fight him? Ha! - but when she’d called out one night, voice clear and strong, he’d startled so bad he almost fell into the hearth. 

“Who’s stealing from me?” she’d asked. Her back stooped under the weight of her years, but her voice was diamond. All the strongest youkai were ancient, he’d thought. 

Maybe it was the loneliness, or the fact that he was a stupid little seven year old - or maybe he’d just wanted to check to see if he still remembered how to talk- but he’d opened his mouth and said, “Nobody.”

The old lady had thought that was really funny. He’d been as red as his clothes. When she finished laughing, she told him to take as much as he wanted - it was hard for her to chew the crispy rice at the bottom, she’d explained. Hunger won over pride and he’d stuffed his face until the pot was empty. 

He came back the next night. 

There wasn’t always rice - hard to chew, difficult to harvest - but there was always something leftover. “Old people know how to survive on less,” she’d explained once. He hadn’t answered, mouth full of radish and broth. 

“How old are you?” he’d finally asked one night. The hutch had been pitch black, between the new moon and her lack of candles. She’d hummed, pensive. “Many years,” she’d said after a length. “I passed sixty long ago. Perhaps I’m eighty now. Don’t remember.” 

He’d thought of his own mother, empty and gone. She hadn't ever told him her age. “That’s a good number,” he’d replied, unsure why he was saying it or why it made him feel so sad. 

The old lady had laughed. “I suppose. And you?”

“Seven.”

“My. A man.” Her tone had been teasing, and he’d frowned in her direction - he couldn’t actually see her, his vision so dull on these nights. She’d continued. “I suppose you don’t plan on stealing my food forever, do you? Until you’re my age?” 

Eighty had seemed an unattainable number, completely unfathomable. He’d lived seven years already and had found each one eternally long - eighty just seemed excessive. 

The old woman hadn’t cared about his thoughts. “It doesn’t matter,” she’d said. The floorboards had creaked under her weight, as worn down and beaten as she was. “You come as long as you want.”

“I’m eating all your food.” 

“That’s alright.”

“No it’s not.” Why had he protested? But only the thought of her letting him just eat her stores made him uncomfortable - should he chop wood for her? What did old women need?

“It is. You’re here. And I’m not alone. So it’s alright.”

He’d blinked, uselessly, against the night and the wet in his eyes. “Is that it?” he’d asked. 

A hum. “Of course,” she’d replied. “What’s worse than being alone? Eat what you want and talk to me.”

Months had passed. The village girls couldn’t explain where the fresh hearthwood came from or why the old woman was going through food so quickly, but they didn’t stop bringing fresh vegetables and the old woman had remained silent on the matter, treating them to a toothless smile and a bid to take care. Every night, he would scrape the bottom of the rice pot clean and gnaw on the dried meat she could no longer chew. He would tell her all sorts of stupid things - how the fish in the river were doing, how the children in the village yelled at each other, how the farmers worried at the crop yields and how the border skirmishes bloomed and faded. She’d listened patiently, asking him to repeat often - she couldn’t hear well - and he’d obliged her in a way he hadn’t since burying his mother’s silks. “Your voice is stronger now,” she’d remarked one night. “You’re growing well.”

“I’ll be eight soon,” he’d returned. Winter had been fast approaching.

She’d clapped her hands. “Eight! And then you’ll be married and old.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” He’d poured water in the ceramic pot to let it soak - he’d have to scrub it well if she planned on making anything other than soup for the next day. “Nobody’ll marry me.”

“Because you’re a food thief?”

“I look different.”

“Hmm.” Silence. “Well that’s alright.”

“It’s not. Others won’t play with me - not that, not that I play anymore, I’m grown now - but, but others don’t - they don’t want to be with me. Because I’m different. So I can’t be with anybody. I can’t get married or have friends.”

The old lady had been silent for a long moment while he’d poured grit into the pot for scrubbing. Then she’d said, “Bullshit.”

He hadn’t known she could say that word. 

She’d said, “My son was born with no hands. He was born with one eye. He was different, and he was loved. And his wife thought the world of him, and he of her. Villagers were cruel and he endured much. But he found somebody because she saw him, and you will too.”

He’d stayed quiet, scrubbing at the pot, concentrated on getting all the dirt and grime off. 

“You don’t have to get married. You - it doesn’t have to be a spouse. It can be a friend. Anybody.”

Scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing, until even his skin hurt. 

“It can be as simple as a boy and an old woman eating a meal and talking.”

There’d been a loud crack as the pot broke, ceramic and glaze spiderwebbing under the force of his scrubbing. For some reason, he’d been consumed by terror. 

“Did you break my pot?”

She’d been answered by silence. He’d run.

A week later, a new pot had sat in her hearth, appearing overnight as if by magic. He’d never returned.

\--

_ “I’ll give you the jewel.” Her hands had been callused from her bow, from grinding herbs, from pinching needles. Three years his senior, and crushed by the village’s expectations. “But you have to become human.”  _

_ And then he’d be part of the village, and they’d look at him and smile, and she’d smile too and they’d have a rice pot with a lid and everything. “Okay,” he’d said, and she’d bowed her head in gratitude. _

_ Fifty years of silence followed shortly after, punctuated by dreams of her burning face and the scent of blood. The betrayal in her eyes never stopped being fresh. The betrayal in his chest was years old. _

\--

“You’ve gotta wash your feet. Do you see how dirty your feet are? They’re so dirty, mama cleans so much and you’re gonna track dirt all over the floor, so you have to - here, come here-”

Kagome leads him to the side of the fuckoff huge house she’s got and points to a silver thing sticking out of the wall all expectant, like he’s supposed to know what it does. He scowls at her and she scowls back, because she’s the type of person who sees fangs and just? Ignores them? It’s impressive, in all sorts of nerve-wracking ways. 

She’s doing that hands-on-her-hips thing. “Well?” She says.

He widens his eyes at her, mentally projecting his  _ own _ hands-on-hips energy at her, suck on  _ that _ , and she responds by rolling her eyes. He saw her roll her eyes once at Sesshomaru. Her blades of blood, her signature move. 

She fiddles with the silver thing - it’s got a little, like a handle, like a twisty little handle, the future is fucking ridiculous - and then there’s water POURING out of the thing and it’s freezing and he flinches back for a second (he’s not afraid, it was just - very unexpected) and she’s beckoning him over. “Stick your feet under the water, get them clean-” she’s saying, and oh, she’s found a little stool for sitting, almost like a bathhouse, except the water is so fucking cold. Future sucks. “I’ll be right back, I need to get you slippers,” she says, like that means anything, and then she fucks off and leaves him there with the stool and the ice water pouring endlessly, infinitely, out of the magic future-pipe. 

He sits. 

Dirt is pretty caked on but he manages to get the water to run mostly clear by the time she returns, carrying a soft towel and plastic slip-ons. He dries his feet at the door and tries the sandals -  _ hates _ them, gonna get rid of those as fast as possible - and follows her into the fuckoff huge house with the fuckoff weird furniture.

Kagome’s mother smiles as warmly as her daughter, waves a greeting from the kitchen, and he’s frozen for a moment, completely lost, unsure of what to do or how to respond. Rescue comes in the form of Kagome’s little brother thundering down the stairs, hollering about “You’re back!” and “Inuyasha-niichan!” and “Did you kill anybody?” and between Kagome’s threats to glue his teeth shut manages to herd Inuyasha into the room with the talking box. At some point Buyo appears, to the surprise of everybody. 

Watching Kagome’s mother move through space is to understand, a little bit, where Kagome’s fearlessness comes from. Higurashi-san doesn’t blanch when she sees him or pause before speaking - she simply enters, announces that dinner is ready, and somehow manages to imply, in those few words, that he is of course welcome to join. It’s alien and leaves him wrong-footed and awkward, and he spends a bit too long fiddling with Buyo’s feet while he tries to figure out what he’s supposed to do with his face. Does he smile? Does he thank her? Is she expecting that sort of thing? Does he have to wait for everybody else to start eating or is he considered a guest in this scenario? Except when has he  _ ever _ been a guest anywhere - a pain in the ass, a  _ threat _ , absolutely, but guest? Him? Who is he kidding, there’s no way she meant to include him, this was a mist-

Kagome steps in front of him, manages to smile and look exasperated at the same time. It completely obliterates his train of thought. “We’ve got beef, do you like beef?” she asks, hauling him to his feet. “Or wait - you’ve probably never had beef before, have you? I don’t think it was common before - oh, you’re going to love it! This is, it’s very fancy, they’ve got all these different kinds of grades now - yeah, sit - okay - but anyways-” 

She talks about something called “Kobe beef” and all the different cuts of meat you can get and how they’re all different prices and how the cows have to be raised a certain way and how they’re all from a place that - if his memory serves him right - is unjustifiably far away, no matter how good the meat is. Also he wasn’t aware people just straight-up ate cows now. Weird, he thinks, but not bad, and shovels the rest of the rice and meat into his mouth. 

Souta wipes down the table after, while Kagome clears the dishes and Higurashi-san scrubs at the bazillion pots and pans they apparently have. Old Man Higurashi takes over the room with the talking box - something is happening at seven, allegedly, and he needs to watch it? Whatever - and so the next twenty minutes or so are spent gently tormenting Buyo. When he feels it’s safe, he’ll glance over to Kagome and her mother, drifting around the kitchen and putting leftovers in clear containers and chatting, laughing all lighthearted, like Kagome didn’t put an arrow through the heart of an oni the day before, like Higurashi-san isn’t going to disappear from her life one day and leave her all alone in a world that is so oppressively big and unknown. 

“Help me prep for tomorrow.”

Kagome has turned to face him now, is holding a big steel pot with vegetables and meat, has stacks of something white and round on the counter. Her eyes draw him out of his head. “I want to make gyoza and it goes by faster when there’s people to help. I’ll get Souta.” 

“What,” he starts, but Kagome has dropped the food on the table along with a knife and a slab of wood and disappeared up the stairs, and he’s left with Higurashi-san and her terrible, familiar smile. 

“It was originally a Chinese dish, and became very popular here,” she explains, sitting right next to him as if he isn’t losing his entire mind. “You chop the vegetables and meat very small and add seasonings - like this, see? And this over here is dough…” 

Her voice is steady as she demonstrates, peeling onions and stripping cabbage leaves and dicing them all uniformly. Her hand never wavers, sure and precise; she knows where the blade will land, when to draw her fingers back to avoid injury, how fast to move the knife. She’s an anchor - the moment crystalizes around her, an encompassing stillness that folds him in and quiets something in his chest. 

Kagome returns with Souta in tow, and they too are folded into the moment, Higurashi-san seamlessly drawing them in with a glance. He watches as they prepare the filling - Kagome gives him mixing duty, which he suspects is because it’s the only task she thinks he can handle without destroying the table - and soon they’re filling the dough circles with it. Higurashi-san pleats the circles until they resemble little half-moon pockets, and Kagome soon follows, her pleats gradually becoming neater the more she practices. Souta’s pleats are clumsy, his gyoza lumpy and lopsided, but they disappear among the uniform dumplings Higurashi-san and her daughter make. 

Kagome suddenly reaches across the table and deposits a dough wrapper in front of him. “You make some,” she says, and nudges the bowl of filling in his direction. 

He eyes the bowl and cautiously spoons a small amount - small amounts seem safer, less likely to spill out and waste meat all over the table - and adds it to the center of the wrapper the way he’d seen Higurashi-san do. Then he has to add water - not too much, or else he’ll end up with Souta’s messy hands - and then he has to  _ pleat _ it-

His claws rip through the dough. They rip through the fucking- they, he broke it, he  _ ripped it- _

He might actually break the table. It doesn’t make sense why he, why it - he wants to  _ break the fucking table _ \- but the dough is ruined and it’s just so upsetting, so fundamentally awful, a confirmation that he is at his very baseline unable to do this simple, communal little task, because he is below simple, communal little things, below smiles or invitations and apart from whatever Kagome was trying to do - include him? Seriously? He’s impossible to include, he rips things, he breaks things, he -  _ Kikyou burned and bled and died and did he do that to her?  _ \- and his chest is aching and frozen and above all he wants so desperately to just break this goddamn fucking table. 

Higurashi-san’s hands are warm on his own. He blinks. He breathes. She’s an anchor. She has a ring on her left hand, he notices distantly. She smiles at him. 

“In China, there are many ways to make gyoza, and many ways to fold it,” she says. “One way is to pleat it like this, like what we’ve got here - but another very common way is like this, see?” And her hands, cradling his, clench down so that the wrapper crushes around the filling, sealing it in deformed seams. “And it tastes just as good, and people love it just as much,”. She picks it up and adds it to the pile, like it belongs somehow, like it’s not the ugliest thing she’s ever seen. 

Souta peers at it curiously. “That looks like a way better method,” he remarks, and proceeds to crush his own wrapper. 

Higurashi-san laughs. Even her laugh is familiar. “They’re all good methods,” she says, as she chops and pleats and crushes. “They’re all the same inside, aren’t they? They all taste as good.”

Kagome, silently, hands him another wrapper. Her hands are steady. He breathes in, breathes out, accepts it. He doesn’t break the table. 

\--

The blanket has a checkered pattern, alternating squares of red and white. Kagome says they’re having a “picnic”, and everybody sort of agrees to go along with it because in the future people eat cows, and calling a regular meal a “picnic” just doesn’t rate high on the weirdness scale after that factoid. 

She adds powders and miso paste to the pot they’ve got boiling while Miroku distributes the glass food containers and Shippo feeds the fire. Sango sits with her back straight, eyes forever scanning for threats. After a few trial tastes, Kagome determines the stock ready and drops in the frozen gyoza, stirring gently so as to not break them apart.

There’s a really gentle breeze that keeps the heat from becoming too awful, despite the sun’s best efforts. Kagome ladles out bowls and opens the containers, and soon they’re just sitting and eating, listening to the grass and the leaves as the wind rustles through. Nobody cares about what the gyoza looks like. 

“Thank-you Kagome,” Shippo says around his chopsticks. Suck-up. 

“Yes, thank-you,” Miroku agrees. He holds one of the gyoza up, studies it, before popping it into his mouth. “This is just - these just taste really, very good.”

It takes a moment for the memory to surface. 

“Kagome,” Inuyasha starts. Stops. He fish-mouths for a second. Kagome blinks at him while he reaches for words. 

Fuck it. He points at dumplings in his bowl. “Do you remember what we put in these” he whispers out of the edge of his mouth. 

She looks at him. Looks at the bowl. He sees the moment she makes the connection. “Fuck,” she agrees. 

He laughs so hard he doesn’t hear her apologize to Miroku, or feel her little whack when she gets fed up with his cackling. Miroku accepts her apology with the same annoying graciousness he always has and defers to the other picnic items, and when the food is gone and the blanket is folded away and the fire extinguished, they begin to pick their way back to the village. The cast iron pot is too large to fit in the basket, and too heavy for a human to carry easily, so Inuyasha ends up with the dubious honor of hauling it all the way back.

“Inuyasha,” Kagome calls out. He slows down and she speeds up until they’re walking side by side. He tilts his head at her, waiting. 

“Can you wash this for me? No soap, just a scrub in the river - I brought some rice for Kaede and thought she might want to make some tonight.”

Another memory surfaces, of broken clay and shattered glaze, and for one hateful second his breath hitches. He glances at the pot in his hands, heavy iron thick enough to still retain heat even this long after killing the fire. “Okay,” he hears himself say, and she beams at him, bright and forceful, an anchor so strong it simply stops time, and yes, he thinks, yes, he believes it, he believes her.

“I’ll wait for you at Kaede’s?” Her voice shapes it into a question, lets him turn away. 

“Obviously,” he answers. It feels right.


End file.
